By: Lorne Whiting

On: December 13th, 2013

You play a samurai wielding a sword and a gun in a small arena, and the first player to 10 kills wins. The fast paced gameplay will feel familiar to anyone who has played Towerfall’s versus mode, though Samurai Gunn is more focused on close-ranged combat as your bullets are limited and easily deflected.

There’s not a great deal of content for the 15 dollar price tag, with nothing but the basic versus mode and a co-operative survival mode. However, the game has a great deal of polish put in to it and part of the fun is discovering the subtler mechanics, like changing stances or playing dead– or just tapping the up button in the post-game scoring to make it look like your character is laughing.

The game also has phenomenal sound design, with excellent music by Doseone (which was released as an EP with added vocals), and a different voice for each character.

I played this at the amaze event in Berlin, earlier this year. Oh god, this game is great! One of the best computer party games I’ve ever played!

Zetro

Holy fucking tit shits, I love this.

MrBrown

As someone who just doesn’t have any chance to play local multiplayer anymore (because I don’t have any “real life” friends interested in indie games), I have to make the remark that this phrase “focusing on local multiplayer” is just an lazy attempt to make “i’m not going to implement a network protocol” sound like a wise design decision. There are millions of players who have a <10-20ms latency connection to their friends, so the game being very fast and reflex-driven doesn't count as an excuse IMHO ;-)

http://www.keithburgun.net/ Keith Burgun

Game looks really cool. Why is it PC though? Should be Ouya or a livingroom console.

>There’s not a great deal of content for the 15 dollar price tag

This kind of knee-jerk statement about content has to stop being repeated. Competitive games don’t need a lot of content. In fact a lot of times they’re better for having very little content. Would chess get a “not much content!!!” warning if it came out today?

Instead ask about “value”. Does this game have enough value to justify a $15 price? I personally don’t know, but that’s the issue.

http://www.msarge.com msarge

One of the most fun local multiplayer games in YEARS!!!

Guest

feel free to point out a 4 player game with one hit kills and a frame-specific bullet deflection mechanic that has online networking IYHO ;-)

MrBrown

One hit kills are a design decision which is completely independent from any latency issues, it might make existing latency issues more annoying – but it doesn’t *cause* them!

I also don’t see a problem with a “frame-specific bullet deflection mechanic”. 10-20ms network latency, that’s just a single frame of a game running with 60fps, no big deal. Some crappy controllers have a bigger input latency, and most people don’t even notice that.

Guest

“10-20ms network latency”

bahahahaha got to love an armchair game developer

Anonymous

The design does not cause the latency issues – but latency issues simply make the design infeasible.

MrBrown

Haha, it’s cute how you think you can judge me ^^

10-20ms is the average round trip time to the friends I usually play together with here in Germany. I know exactly what network latency means and how it affects gameplay compared to other latencies (controller input, video output, etc.).

“Supercade” for example proves that fast, reflex-driven arcade games can work very well over the network as long as the network latency to the opponent is low enough. It’s perhaps not 100% the same thing as sitting in front of the same screen, but still a very nice and welcome opportunity for players like me whose real-life friends are not interested in these kind of games.

Guest

Supercade uses rollback to mask latency. If you actually think it would be feasible to use such a system in a 4 player game with dramatic one-hit kills, you most definitely have no idea what you are talking about.

John Sandoval

lorne fucking smashes at this game

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